In which I introduce deliberate practice, the key strategy for acquiring career capital, and show how to integrate it into your own working life.
Jordan Tice and I both started playing guitar at the age of twelve. After receiving my first guitar, I formed a band and several months later performed my first “concert”—a reduced-speed interpretation of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” played to polite applause at the Tollgate Grammar School sixth-grade talent show. After this I got serious: I took lessons throughout junior high school and high school. I played every day—sometimes rocking blues solos to Hendrix recordings for hours at a time. My band, which had the questionable name of Rocking Chair, played around a dozen shows a year: festivals, parties, competitions—anywhere, really, that people would allow us to set up our equipment. We once played a gig in a graveyard facing a parking lot. Our drummer’s mom videotaped it. When she pans the camera from our setup in front of the graves to the lot, you realize that the “crowd” consists of no more than a dozen people on folding chairs. She still finds it funny to play this tape.
By the time I graduated high school I could play from a repertoire of hundreds of songs, ranging from Green Day to Pink Floyd. In other words, I had reached the level of expertise you would expect from someone who had played an instrument seriously for the last six years. But this is what I find fascinating: Compared to Jordan Tice’s ability at this same age, I was mediocre.
Jordan picked up guitar at the same point in his life as I did. But by the time he graduated high school, he had been touring the mid-Atlantic with a group of professional bluegrass musicians and had signed his first record deal. When I was in high school, the acoustic group Nickel Creek was thought of, admiringly, by my grade’s music snobs as Dave Matthews for cool people. When Jordan was in high school, he regularly played gigs with their bass player, Mark Schatz. The question hanging over this comparison is why, even though we had both played seriously for the same amount of time, did I end up an average high school strummer while Jordan became a star?
It didn’t take long into my visit with Jordan to understand the answer to this question. The difference in our abilities by the age of eighteen had less to do with the number of hours we practiced—though he probably racked up more total practice hours than I did, we weren’t all that far apart—and more to do with what we did with those hours. One of my most vivid memories of Rocking Chair, for example, was my discomfort playing anything I didn’t know real well. There’s a mental strain that accompanies feeling your way though a tune that’s not ingrained in muscle memory, and I hated that feeling. I learned songs reluctantly, then clung to them fiercely once they had become easy for me. I used to get upset when our rhythm guitar player would suggest we try out something new during band practice. He was happy glancing at a chord chart and then jumping in. I wasn’t. Even at that young age I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability in the performance world.
Compare this to Jordan’s earliest experiences with the guitar. His first teacher was a friend from his parents’ church. As Jordan remembers, their lessons focused on picking out the leads from Allman Brothers records. “So he would write out the lead and then you would go memorize them?” I asked. “No, we would just figure them out by ear,” Jordan replied. To the high school version of myself, the idea of learning complicated lead parts by ear would have been way past my threshold of mental strain and patience. But Jordan came to enjoy this labor. In our interview, a decade beyond his high school years, Jordan at one point grabbed his old Martin and knocked off the solo from “Jessica,” which he somehow still remembered. “Great melody,” he said.
Not only did Jordan’s early practice require him to constantly stretch himself beyond what was comfortable, but it was also accompanied by instant feedback. The teacher was always there, Jordan explained, “to jump in and show me if I junked up a harmony.”
Watching Jordan’s current practice regime, these traits—strain and feedback—remain central. To get up to speed on the wide picking style he needs for his new tune, he keeps adjusting the speed of his practicing to a point just past where he’s comfortable. When he hits a wrong note, he immediately stops and starts over, providing instant feedback for himself. While practicing, the strain on his face and the gasping nature of his breaths can be uncomfortable even to watch—I can’t imagine what it feels like to actually do. But Jordan is happy to practice like this for hours at a time.
This, then, explains why Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced. The Nashville studio musician Mark Casstevens seconded this dedication to constantly stretching your abilities. When I talked to him, for example, he was in the process of slowly getting up to speed on a “complicated new tune in B-flat with a great deal of barre chords and nasty counterpoint.” Even someone with Casstevens’s level of (literally) award-winning experience (the Academy of Country Music recently named him Specialty Instrumentalist of the Year) can’t avoid the need to “go out to the woodshed in order to practice.”
“I develop muscle memory the hard way, by repetition,” he said, echoing Jordan’s long, skill-stretching practice sessions. “The harder I work, the more relaxed I can play, and the better it sounds.”
These observations, of course, are about more than just guitar playing. The central idea of this chapter is that the difference in strategy that separates average guitar players like me from stars like Tice and Casstevens is not confined to music. This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle—one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.
If you want to understand the science of how people get good at something, chess is an excellent place to start. For one thing, it provides a clear definition of ability: your ranking. Though different chess ranking systems have been proposed with varying popularity, the current standard is the Elo system used by the World Chess Federation. This system gives players a score starting at zero that increases as they get better. Its calculation is complicated, but at a high level of approximation it reflects one’s performance at official tournaments. If you do better than expected, it goes up, and if you do worse, it goes down. A solid novice player who plays the occasional weekend competition will have a score in the triple digits. Bobby Fischer peaked at 2785. In 1990, Garry Kasparov became the first player to ever reach 2800. The highest score ever obtained was 2851, also by Kasparov.
The other reason chess proves useful for studying performance is the fact that it’s really hard. To beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, for example, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer had to analyze 200 million moves per second, and to play a competitive opening, it drew from a database of over 700,000 grand-master games. Given chess’s difficulty, we can expect that the strategies required to get good will be more pronounced and therefore easier to identify.
These traits explain why scientists have been studying chess players since as early as the 1920s, when a trio of German psychologists set out to determine if grand masters had freakish memories.1 (Interestingly, it turns out they don’t: Though grand masters are fantastically efficient at storing chess positions in their minds, their general recall ability is quite average.) One study that proves especially relevant to our interests is more recent. In 2005, a research team led by Neil Charness, a psychologist from Florida State University, published the results of a decades-long investigation of the practice habits of chess players.2 Throughout the nineties, Charness’s team had been placing ads in newspapers and posting flyers at chess tournaments, looking for ranked players to participate in their project. They ended up surveying over four hundred players, from around the world, in an effort to understand why some were better than others. Each player was given a form to fill out that requested a detailed history of the player’s chess instruction. The respondents were asked, in essence, to re-create a time line of their development as chess players: At what age did they start? What type of training did they receive at each year? How many tournaments did they play? Were they coached? How much? And so on.
Previous studies had shown it takes around ten years, at minimum, to become a grand master. (As the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson likes to point out, even prodigies like Bobby Fisher managed to fit in ten years of playing before they achieved international recognition: He just started this accumulation earlier than most.) This is the “ten-year rule,” sometimes called the “10,000-hour rule,” which has been bouncing around scientific circles since the 1970s, but was popularized more recently by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling 2008 book, Outliers.3 Here’s how he summarized it:
The 10,000-Hour Rule
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours [emphasis mine].
In Outliers, Gladwell pointed to this rule as evidence that great accomplishment is not about natural talent, but instead about being in the right place at the right time to accumulate such a massive amount of practice. Bill Gates? He happened to attend one of the first high schools in the country to install a computer and allow their students unsupervised access—making him one of the first in his generation to build up thousands of hours of practice on this technology. Mozart? His dad was a fanatic about practicing. By the time Mozart was being toured around Europe as a prodigy, he had squeezed in more than twice the number of practice hours that similarly aged musician contemporaries had acquired.
What interests me about Charness’s study, however, is that it moves beyond the 10,000-hour rule by asking not just how long people worked, but also what type of work they did. In more detail, they studied players who had all spent roughly the same amount of time—around 10,000 hours—playing chess. Some of these players had become grand masters while others remained at an intermediate level. Both groups had practiced the same amount of time, so the difference in their ability must depend on how they used these hours. It was these differences that Charness sought.
In the 1990s, this was a relevant question. There was debate in the chess world at the time surrounding the best strategies for improving. One camp thought tournament play was crucial, as it provides practice with tight time limits and working through distractions. The other camp, however, emphasized serious study—pouring over books and using teachers to help identify and then eliminate weaknesses. When surveyed, the participants in Charness’s study thought tournament play was probably the right answer. The participants, as it turns out, were wrong. Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity.
On closer examination, the importance of serious study becomes more obvious. In serious study, Charness concluded, “materials can be deliberately chosen or adapted such that the problems to be solved are at a level that is appropriately challenging.” This contrasts with tournament play, where you are likely to draw an opponent who is either demonstrably better or demonstrably worse than yourself: both situations where “skill improvement is likely to be minimized.” Furthermore, in serious study, feedback is immediate: be it from looking up the answer to a chess problem in a book or, as is more typically the case for serious players, receiving immediate feedback from an expert coach. The Norwegian chess phenom Magnus Carlsen, for example, paid Garry Kasparov over $700,000 a year to add polish to his otherwise intuitive playing style.
Notice how well chess fits with our earlier discussion of guitar practice. The “serious study” employed by top chess players sounds similar to Jordan Tice’s approach to music: They’re both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback. At the same time, notice how chess-tournament play sounds a lot like my approach to guitar: It’s enjoyable and exciting, but it’s not necessarily making you better. I spent many hours playing songs I knew, including dozens and dozens of hours spent on stage. Like the intermediate players in the Charness study, I was letting this satisfying work pile up ineffectively while Jordan, during these same ages, was painstakingly squirreling away the serious study that would make him exceptional.
In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”4 As hundreds of follow-up studies have since shown, deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields, among which are chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music.5 If you want to understand the source of professional athletes’ talent, for example, look to their practice schedules—almost without exception they have been systematically stretching their athletic abilities, with the guidance of expert coaches, since they were children. If you instead turned the tables on Malcolm Gladwell, and asked him about his writing ability, he too would point you toward deliberate practice. In Outliers he notes that he spent ten years honing his craft in the Washington Post newsroom before he moved to the New Yorker and began writing his breakout book, The Tipping Point.
“When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents,” Ericsson notes. “However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers… no general superiority was found.”6 In other words, outside a handful of extreme examples—such as the height of professional basketball players and the girth of football linemen—scientists have failed to find much evidence of natural abilities explaining experts’ successes. It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.
Here’s what struck me as important about deliberate practice: It’s not obvious. Outside of fields such as chess, music, and professional athletics, which have clear competitive structures and training regimes, few participate in anything that even remotely approximates this style of skill development. As Ericsson explains, “Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. This is what happened to me with my guitar playing, to the chess players who stuck to tournament play, and to most knowledge workers who simply put in the hours: We all hit plateaus.
When I first encountered the work of Ericsson and Charness, this insight startled me. It told me that in most types of work—that is, work that doesn’t have a clear training philosophy—most people are stuck. This generates an exciting implication. Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you.
To successfully adopt the craftsman mindset, therefore, we have to approach our jobs in the same way that Jordan approaches his guitar playing or Garry Kasparov his chess training—with a dedication to deliberate practice. How to accomplish this feat is the goal of the remainder of this chapter. I want to start, in the next section, by arguing that I’m not the first to have this insight. When we return to the stories of Alex Berger and Mike Jackson, we find that deliberate practice was at the core of their quest for work they love.
Consider Alex Berger’s two-year rise from assistant to cocreator of a national television series. He told me that getting your writing to “network quality” can take from a couple of years at the minimum to as many as twenty-five. The reason he was on the fast track, he explained, was his debate-champ-style obsession with improving. “I have a never-ending thirst to get better,” he said. “It’s like a sport, you have to practice and you have to study.” Alex admitted that even though he’s now an established writer, he still reads screenwriting books, looking for places where his craft could stand improving. “It’s a constant learning process,” he said.
The other thing I noticed about Alex is that this learning is not done in isolation: “You need to be constantly soliciting feedback from colleagues and professionals,” he told me. During his rise, Alex consistently chose projects where he’d be forced to show his work to others. While still working as an assistant at NBC, for example, he was writing two pilots: one for VH1 and another with a producer he met at the National Lampoon. In both cases, people were waiting to see his scripts—there was no avoiding having them be read and dissected. His Curb Your Enthusiasm spec, to name another example, which helped him land his job with Michael Eisner, underwent a lot of scrutiny from Alex’s colleagues, at his request. “When I look back now, I’m humiliated that I ever showed it to anyone,” Alex recalled. But it was necessary if he was going to get better. “I hope I can look back ten years later and say the same about what I’m writing now.”
In Alex, we see exactly the traits that Anders Ericsson defined as crucial for deliberate practice. He stretched his abilities by taking on projects that were beyond his current comfort zone; and not just one at a time, but often up to three or four writing commissions concurrently, all the while holding down a day job! He then obsessively sought feedback, on everything—even if, looking back now, he’s humiliated at the quality of scripts he was sending out. This is textbook deliberate practice: And it worked. It allowed Alex to acquire career capital in a winner-take-all market that’s notoriously reluctant to hand it out.
We see a similar commitment to deliberate practice in Mike Jackson’s story. In each stage of his path to becoming a venture capitalist he threw himself into a project beyond his current capabilities and then hustled to make it a success. He took on an ambitious master’s thesis that he then translated into leading an even more ambitious international research project. He went from the project into the harsh world of start-ups, where, without outside investment, his ability to pay his rent was dependent on him figuring things out quickly.
Furthermore, at all stages of this path, Mike was not only stretching himself, he was also receiving direct feedback. The work he was leading for the international research project was being prepared for peer review—the epitome of ruthless response. When running his start-up, this feedback took the form of how much money came through the door. If he ran the company poorly, there would be no escaping this fact: His critique would arrive in the form of bankruptcy.
In his current position as a venture capitalist, Mike maintains his dedication to stretching his ability, guided by feedback. His new tool of choice is a spreadsheet, which he uses to track how he spends every hour of every day. “At the beginning of each week I figure out how much time I want to spend on different activities,” he explained. “I then track it so I can see how close I came to my targets.” On the sample spreadsheet he sent me, he divides his activities into two categories: hard to change (i.e., weekly commitments he can’t avoid) and highly changeable (i.e., self-directed activities that he controls). Here’s the amount of time he dedicates to each:
Mike Jackson’s Work-Hour Allocation
Hard-to-Change Commitments
| Activity | Hours Allocated for the Week |
7.5 |
|
| Lunch/Breaks/Other | 4 |
| Planning/Organization | 1.5 |
| Partner Meeting/Administrative | 4 |
| Weekly Fund-raising Meeting | 1 |
Highly Changeable Commitments
| Activity | Hours Allocated for the Week |
| Improving Fund-raising Materials | 3 |
| Fund-raising Process | 12 |
| Due Diligence Research | 3 |
| Deal Flow Sourcing | 3 |
| Meetings/Calls with Potential Investors | 1 |
| Work with Portfolio Companies | 2 |
| Networking/Professional Development | 3 |
Mike’s goal with his spreadsheet is to become more “intentional” about how his workday unfolds. “The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day,” he explained. “But that is not the most strategic way to spend your time.” Mike now freely admits that he doesn’t “do much e-mail.” Even after we had been working for a while on the interviews for this book, my scheduling e-mails to Mike only sporadically generated a reply. I eventually figured out that it worked better to call him while he was commuting to his Palo Alto office. On reflection, of course, this makes perfect sense from Mike’s perspective. Spending hours every day sorting through non-critical e-mail from authors such as myself or from business students fishing for tips, among other trivialities, would impede his ability to raise money and find good companies—ultimately the job he’s judged on. Does he annoy some people because of this lack of availability? Probably. But take my example of eventually being forced to call him during his commute: The important stuff still finds its way to him, but on his schedule.
When you look at Mike’s spreadsheet, you also notice that he restricts the hours dedicated to required tasks that don’t ultimately make him better at what he does (eighteen hours). The majority of his week is instead focused on what matters: raising money, vetting investments, and helping his fund’s companies (twenty-seven hours). Without this careful tracking, this ratio would be much different.
This is a great example of deliberate practice at work. “I want to spend time on what’s important, instead of what’s immediate,” Mike explained. At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead. The fact that he’s been promoted three times in less than three years underscores the effectiveness of this deliberate approach.
The stories of Alex Berger and Mike Jackson provide a nice example of deliberate practice in a knowledge-work setting. It can still be difficult, however, to figure out how to apply this strategy in your own working life. Motivated by this reality, I drew from the research literature on deliberate practice, as well as from the stories of craftsman like Alex and Mike, to construct a series of steps for successfully applying this strategy. In this section, I’ll detail these steps. There is no magic formula, but deliberate practice is a highly technical process, so I’m hoping that this specificity will help you get started.
For the sake of clarity, I will introduce some new terminology. When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. Television writing is a winner-take-all market because all that matters is your ability to write good scripts. That is, the only capital type is your script-writing capability.
An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection. The cleantech space is an auction market. Mike Jackson’s capital, for example, included expertise in renewable energy markets and entrepreneurship, but there are a variety of other types of relevant skills that also could have led to a job in this field.
With this in mind, the first task in building a deliberate practice strategy is to figure out what type of career capital market you are competing in. Answering this question might seem obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to get it wrong. In fact, this is how I interpret the beginning of Alex’s story. When he arrived in Los Angeles, he treated the entertainment industry as an auction market. By taking a job as a Web editor at the National Lampoon, he began to build up a stable of college-aged humor writers. He also filmed a pilot for a low-budget show for the organization. These actions make sense in an auction market where it’s important to build up a diverse collection of capital. But the entertainment industry is not an auction market; it’s instead winner-take-all. If you want a career in television writing, as Alex discovered, only one thing matters: the quality of your scripts. It took him a year to realize his mistake, but once he did, he left the Lampoon to become an assistant to a TV executive so he could better understand the single type of capital of any value to his field. It was only at this point that he began to gain traction in his career.
Mistaking a winner-take-all for an auction market is common. I see it often in an area relevant to my own life: blogging. Here’s a typical e-mail from among the many I receive from people asking for advice on growing their own blog audience:
“I’ve finished my first month of posting and am at about three thousand views. The bounce rate, however, is incredibly high, particularly through Digg and Reddit submissions, where it can get close to 90 percent. I’m wondering what next steps you think I should take to bring down the bounce rate?”
This new blogger was viewing blogging as an auction market. In his conception, there are many different types of capital relevant to your blog—from its format, to its post frequency, to its search-engine optimization, to how easy it is to find it on social networks (this particular blogger invested serious time in submitting every post to as many social networking sites as possible). He viewed the world through statistics and hoped that with the right combination of capital he could get them where he needed them to be to make money. The problem, however, is that blogging in the advice space—where his site existed—is not an auction market, it’s winner-take-all. The only capital that matters is whether or not your posts compel the reader.
Some top blogs in this space have notoriously clunky designs, but they all accomplish the same baseline goal: They inspire their readers. When you correctly understand the market where blogging exists, you stop calculating your bounce rate and start focusing instead on saying something people really care about—which is where your energy should be if you want to succeed.
Mike Jackson, by contrast, correctly identified that he was in an auction market. He wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to do, but he knew it would involve the environment, so he set out to gain any capital relevant to this broad topic.
Once you’ve identified your market, you must then identify the specific type of capital to pursue. If you’re in a winner-take-all market, this is trivial: By definition, there’s only one type of capital that matters. For an auction market, however, you have flexibility. A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gates—opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. For example, Mike Jackson’s next step after his degree was to work with a Stanford professor on his environmental-policy research. This decision helped Mike acquire a key type of career capital—a nuanced understanding of international energy markets. At the same time, however, keep in mind that this was also an opportunity that was open to Mike because he was already a Stanford student earning a degree in the field. This made it relatively easy for him to jump into this new role. For someone outside of Stanford, by contrast, being put in charge of such an important project would have been a much less likely proposition.
The advantage of open gates is that they get you farther faster, in terms of career capital acquisition, than starting from scratch. It helps to think about skill acquisition like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. In other words, it’s hard to start from scratch in a new field. If, for example, Mike had decided to leave Stanford to go work for a private sustainability non-profit, he would have been starting at the ground floor with no particular leg up. By instead leveraging his Stanford education to gain a position with a Stanford professor, he was acquiring valuable capital much sooner.
It’s at this point, once you’ve identified exactly what skill to build, that you can, for guidance, begin to draw from the research on deliberate practice. The first thing this literature tells us is that you need clear goals. If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, then it’s hard to take effective action. Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune magazine who wrote a book on deliberate practice,7 put it this way in an article that appeared in Fotune: “[Deliberate practice] requires good goals.”8
When you ask a musician like Jordan Tice, for example, there’s little ambiguity about what getting “good” means to him at that moment. There’s always some new, more complicated technique to master. For Alex Berger, the definition of “good” was also clear: his scripts being taken seriously. To give a concrete example, one of the projects he was working on while still an assistant was the development of a spec script to submit to talent agencies. For him, at this early stage of his career capital acquisition, “good” meant having a script good enough to land him an agent. There was no ambiguity about what it meant to succeed at this goal.
Returning to Geoff Colvin, in the article cited above he gives the following warning about deliberate practice:
Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.
If you show up and do what you’re told, you will, as Anders Ericsson explained earlier in this chapter, reach an “acceptable level” of ability before plateauing. The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition. The bad news is that the reason so few people accomplish this feat is exactly because of the trait Colvin warned us about: Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
I like the term “stretch” for describing what deliberate practice feels like, as it matches my own experience with the activity. When I’m learning a new mathematical technique—a classic case of deliberate practice—the uncomfortable sensation in my head is best approximated as a physical strain, as if my neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations. As any mathematician will admit, this stretching feels much different than applying a technique you’ve already mastered, which can be quite enjoyable. But this stretching, as any mathematician will also admit, is the precondition to getting better.
This is what you should experience in your own pursuit of “good.” If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”
Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you thought was good. As Colvin explains in his Fortune article, “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.” It’s so tempting to just assume what you’ve done is good enough and check it off your to-do list, but it’s in honest, sometimes harsh feedback that you learn where to retrain your focus in order to continue to make progress.
Alex Berger, for example, went to elaborate lengths to keep a constant stream of feedback coming. Recall that during his first year of seriously pursuing career capital in television writing, he was working on two pilots: one for VH1 and another with a producer he met at the National Lampoon. In both cases, he was working with professionals who wouldn’t hesitate to let him know what was working and what was not in his writing. Though he now describes himself as being somewhat “humiliated” by the quality of writing he was putting out for feedback at this stage, he also recognizes that the continuous and harsh feedback he received accelerated the growth of his ability.
In his 2007 interview with Charlie Rose, here’s how Steve Martin explained his strategy for learning the banjo: “[I thought], if I stay with it, then one day I will have been playing for forty years, and anyone who sticks with something for forty years will be pretty good at it.”
To me, this is a phenomenal display of patience. Learning clawhammer banjo is hard, and because of this, Martin was willing to look forty years into the future for the payoff—a recognition of the frustrating months of hard work and mediocre playing ahead. In his memoir, Martin expounds on this idea when he discusses the importance of “diligence” for his success in the entertainment business. What’s interesting is that Martin redefines the word so that it’s less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you. The final step for applying deliberate practice to your working life is to adopt this style of diligence.
The logic works as follows: Acquiring capital can take time. For Alex, it took about two years of serious deliberate practice before his first television script was produced. Mike Jackson was a half decade out of college before cashing in his capital to land a dream job.
This is why Martin’s diligence is so important: Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need. I think the image of Martin returning to his banjo, day after day, for forty years, is poignant. It captures well the feel of how career capital is actually acquired: You stretch yourself, day after day, month after month, before finally looking up and realizing, “Hey, I’ve become pretty good, and people are starting to notice.”